The Problem With How Jeff Sessions Talks About Crime

He’s making unfounded claims about the relationship between crime rates and scrutiny of law enforcement.

April 20, 2017

Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks at a news conference on March 2, 2017, at the Justice Department in Washington, DC. (Reuters / Yuri Gripas)

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Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that consent decrees—formal agreements between municipalities and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to improve local policing, often put in place in response to discriminatory practices—can “reduce the morale of police departments.” He wasn’t just paying lip service to police officers; earlier in the month, Sessions ordered a review of all consent decrees across the United States. Under President Obama, the DOJ regularly used these decrees, which offer the department a way to increase federal oversight, to work with cities to overhaul troubled police departments. In Sessions’s DOJ, consent decrees are likely to be rolled back, but his reason—that they make Americans less safe—does not hold up. Worse yet, it incorrectly drums up fears of urban black and brown dwellers as more prone to violence and crime.

“Every place these decrees, and as you’ve mentioned some of these investigations have gone forward, we’ve seen too often big crime increases,” Sessions continued, speaking to a right-wing talk radio show host. “I mean big crime increases. Murder doubling and things of that nature.” That’s inaccurate.

And in his first speech as the federal government’s top law-enforcement officer, delivered to the National Association of Attorneys General, Sessions said: “One of the big things out there that’s, I think, causing trouble, and where you see the greatest increase in violence and murders in cities is somehow, some way, we undermined the respect for our police and made, oftentimes, their job more difficult.”

Consent decrees are one way to address problems in police departments, though Professor Berk said there is no definitive proof of their effectiveness. “What you have are some claims of good outcomes and some claims bad outcomes, based on anecdotal evidence,” Berk said. But Sessions has made conclusive statements about the approach, that consent decrees are making America less safe. And that is simply not the case.

Collier MeyersonTwitterCollier Meyerson is a Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute, where she focuses on reporting about race and politics, and an investigative fellow at Reveal.